I In an essay that sketches a postmodern geography of western racisms, ethnicities, and identitie... more I In an essay that sketches a postmodern geography of western racisms, ethnicities, and identities, Ali Rattansi sets out to challenge the constancy of representational narratives of self and identity that foreground the coherent and rationalist archetypes of modernist discourses. Disrupting the conscious logic of intention and rationality, Rattansi posits the imaginary space of the psychic as an orientation from which unconscious desires, splitting, disavowal, identifications, and ambivalence blur the boundaries between one person’s end and another’s beginning. Confronted with the interminable task of self-definition in uncertain times, ‘‘difference’’ helps to set the limits between self and another, policing the recognizable (and not-so-recognizable) periphery of that which is not ‘I.’ Difference lays the groundwork for subjectivity by ‘‘precariously identifying where the ‘I’ ends and unknowable other begins’’ (Pellegrini 7). In a critique of the ‘‘endlessly expanding enumeratio...
I In an essay that sketches a postmodern geography of western racisms, ethnicities, and identitie... more I In an essay that sketches a postmodern geography of western racisms, ethnicities, and identities, Ali Rattansi sets out to challenge the constancy of representational narratives of self and identity that foreground the coherent and rationalist archetypes of modernist discourses. Disrupting the conscious logic of intention and rationality, Rattansi posits the imaginary space of the psychic as an orientation from which unconscious desires, splitting, disavowal, identifications, and ambivalence blur the boundaries between one person’s end and another’s beginning. Confronted with the interminable task of self-definition in uncertain times, ‘‘difference’’ helps to set the limits between self and another, policing the recognizable (and not-so-recognizable) periphery of that which is not ‘I.’ Difference lays the groundwork for subjectivity by ‘‘precariously identifying where the ‘I’ ends and unknowable other begins’’ (Pellegrini 7). In a critique of the ‘‘endlessly expanding enumeratio...
Uploads
Papers by Sara Matthews